Victorian America was a society of infinite sexual complexity. It simultaneously spawned both the loose and vigorous sexuality of the frontier and the repression of Edith Wharton's New York. It elaborated a subtle and delicate world of same-sex love among women and men. It both condemned and was fascinated by male homosexuality, while refusing to define lesbianism as deviant. It supported a multitude of communal and religious attacks on the patriarchal family, from the sexual austerity of the Shakers, through the sexual pleasures of Fanny Wright's Nashoba and Oneida's communal family, to the polygamy of the Mormons. Thousands of Americans attended Victoria Woodhull's free-love rallies and sustained without much psychic disarray the shock of the Beecher-Tildon scandal. Pornography, venereal disease rates, prostitution, and widespread abortion point to a society actively engaged in the pursuit of real and fantasized sexual pleasures, both within and outside conjugal confines.